“I’m sorry to hear it. Take care, Ian. Someone is being very clever. And that can be dangerous.”
He didn’t tell her about the blood on his sheets. Instead, he thanked her and put up the receiver.
Hamish said, “There’s Lady Benton. She will ken the man—”
And Hamish was right, Rutledge thought as he went back to where he’d left the motorcar. Surely she could tell him more—she must have dealt often enough with Major Dinsmore.
Yet there was also something in Melinda’s voice that worried him. Did it have to do with her friendship with the dead man?
Or was his own imagination running away with him, because he’d expected too much from that telephone conversation and had been disappointed?
He’d commanded soldiers on the Western Front. Not quite the same, perhaps, as commanding an airfield. But men were the same, the duties and responsibilities were the same, and the burden on a good officer to keep up morale and fighting spirit were the same. On the drive back to Walmer, he reviewed some of his own experiences in the trenches. But he could find nothing that could have accounted for one dead officer, under suspicious circumstances, and the sudden desertion or disappearance, of a capable mechanic at the airfield in 1917. That brought him full circle to the Abbey, and the lives of the people there.
If events on the airfield were just what they’d appeared to be, an accident and a desertion, then what was there about the Abbey that prompted the odd display in Lady Benton’s private garden?
The last visitor for the day had left the Abbey and Lady Benton was making the final rounds when Mrs. Hailey let Rutledge in the main door.
“Is she expecting you?” the housekeeper asked skeptically.
“No. But I don’t believe she’ll mind answering a few more questions.”
She swung the heavy door shut with a loud thump and shoved the great bar across, her way of letting him know what she thought about his questions. “That’s all anyone has done—ask questions. With no answers forthcoming from the police. Or Scotland Yard, for that matter.”
“What do you think we ought to be doing?” he asked as she led him from the great hall to the first of the state rooms.
“You come during the morning or the afternoon, but you are never here at night. There’s no telephone in the house. If she needs help, there’s no one to send. From her wing of the house, sounds from the other wing can’t be heard. She’d never know someone was in the Abbey until it was too late.”
“Are you suggesting she ought to stay in Walmer until we’ve discovered what’s behind what she saw?” he asked as she opened the door into the next room.
“And leave the Abbey empty altogether?” There was disdain in her voice. “Didn’t I tell you before that it made sense for someone to stay here with her?”
“You yourself, perhaps?”
“And what good would I be, in an emergency? Do you have a revolver with you?”
He had one. It was in the trunk beneath his bed, with his medals and uniforms and the rest of his war. But he wasn’t allowed to carry one on duty.
“She does. I’ve seen it in the bottom drawer of her dressing table. It was her husband’s.”
“Can she use it?” he asked, suddenly alert.
“I expect she can. He’d have taught her.”
Hamish said, “That will lead to trouble. Mark my words.”
Ignoring the voice, Rutledge was about to ask if it was loaded, when they entered the third room, an elegant study with Empire furnishings and gilt-framed paintings. One, he recognized, was a likeness of the Duke of Wellington mounted on Copenhagen, his favorite horse.
Lady Benton turned from examining a spot on the carpet, saying, “Margaret, I think we ought to—” She broke off when she saw Rutledge.
“News already?” she went on.
“More questions. He says,” Mrs. Hailey retorted. “Do you wish me to see to the rest of the rooms, my lady?”
“Yes, could you, please? And Mr. Rutledge and I will lock all the doors.”
He followed her through to the private sitting room, and from there to each of the house doors. She didn’t speak until they were out of Mrs. Hailey’s hearing, then she asked, “What is it you wish to know?”
They had locked the door to the stable walk and were moving on to the garden room.
“Who was the officer in charge at the airfield?”
That surprised her. “Colonel Haverford. But he was seldom here, there were other small airfields under his command. And so Major Dinsmore carried out most of the day-to-day duties. There were two squadrons here, and perhaps a hundred or so men. They were supposed to guard the Channel crossings, but they were often assigned to cover the French coast as well.”
“Did you come to know Major Dinsmore as well as you did Captain Nelson?”
She stopped in the passage they were walking down. It was dimly lit and he couldn’t read her expression, but he thought she was angry.
“Why does everyone assume that I spent most of my time with Roger Nelson? I didn’t. But I liked him well enough, and he reminded me, a little, of Eric and his father. After Eric was killed, I found that comforting. Roger’s voice had the same timbre, and sometimes there was a gesture, a way he approached a subject—I could almost close my eyes and believe—but I knew, even as I did, that he wasn’t my son. I wasn’t in love with him, nor he with me. Is it so impossible to believe that we could have been friends?”
Rutledge remembered a time when he and Meredith Channing had been friends. And he found himself thinking that perhaps that was all he would ever have with Kate—a friendship. He understood loneliness, and he could hear that aching loneliness in Lady Benton’s voice.
“I’m sorry if you took my question wrong,” he said gently. “I would like to know more about the Major, and as he’s dead—”
“Oh—I didn’t know,” she said, sadness in her voice. “I could see, those last weeks here, before the Armistice, that he wasn’t well. But I took that—I believed that was the stress of command, and the war, and losing good men. I’d hoped that after the fighting stopped, he could find his own peace.”
“That was clumsy of me,” he told her. “Someone who knew him gave me the news.”
“How sad for his wife. She was afraid of everything, he said, even dying or the Germans landing and herding everyone into concentration camps or some such. What we’d done to the Boers. She’d read about that, and she was sure the Germans would treat us the same way.”
She moved on down the passage and came to the kitchen quarters, checking the locks on the door there. “His was a mathematical mind—navigation was his favorite subject, and he enjoyed looking at a collection of maps in our library. But he had very little time to relax, his duties mostly kept him down there, on the airfield.”
“How did he take the Captain’s death?”
Lady Benton turned to confront him. “How do you think? Everyone was devastated, it happened right in front of most of the men. They ran to the motorcar, tried to save him, but it was too late. It was the Major who held his body as they freed him from the motorcar. Can you even imagine how horrible that must have been?”